Remembering World War I in the Conflict’s Flash Point

The Vienna Philharmonic Recalls World War I in Sarajevo

In Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, people watch a live broadcast of the Vienna Philharmonic across from City Hall.Credit
Elvis Barukcic/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

SARAJEVO, Bosnia and Herzegovina — If there was a moment that captured better than any other the light and the dark in Sarajevo’s centenary weekend, marking 100 years since the events here that unleashed the demons of World War I, it came with the opening bars of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy.”

As the music of the Vienna Philharmonic soared through the great atrium of Sarajevo’s rebuilt City Hall, and from a giant screen erected for a crowd gathered on the opposite side of the Miljacka River, it was possible for a few moments to forget the more recent outbursts of sectarian recrimination that have clouded the commemorations of the assassinations on June 28, 1914.

The crowd that gathered on Saturday before the outdoor screen, perhaps 2,500 strong, joined hundreds of dignitaries inside the hall in standing up silently as the Beethoven passage was played, many of them with hands on heart — a gesture of homage to Bosnia’s hopes for the future. The concert program named the concert’s concluding piece not as the fourth movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony but as the anthem of the 28-nation European Union.

Europe has its own painful challenges these days with resurgent nationalisms and the drumbeat of political violence, most painfully of late in Ukraine. But for many people in the Balkans, and particularly in Bosnia, being enfolded one day into the European Union, a comity of nations whose charter commits its members to peace, is a paramount ambition.

That vision was the coda for the commemorations, marking the assassinations of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie, who were shot to death 500 yards away along the Miljacka embankment by a 19-year-old Bosnian Serb nationalist, Gavrilo Princip, only minutes after they left a reception in City Hall.

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In Sarajevo, an Assassination Still Reverberates

In Sarajevo, an Assassination Still Reverberates

CreditAndrew Testa for The New York Times

The shadow of those shootings hung over the weekend’s remembrances, much as the ceremonies were dedicated to hopes that political violence in the region is a thing of the past. The European Union was left to organize and fund the commemorations after it became clear that the dueling narratives of the past among Bosnia’s Serb, Croat and Muslim political groupings made a common program impossible.

Ultimately, Serb nationalists chose to boycott all of the events that the other groups, with European backing, supported, in favor of a competing program of concerts, celebrations and statue-building — of Princip, a hero to many Serbs — in parts of Bosnia that are under the nationalists’ control. The Serb performances were accompanied by impassioned speeches, including one by Milorad Dodik, the president of the Serb-controlled republic of Srpska, covering nearly half of Bosnia, in which he declared, “the shots fired 100 years ago by Gavrilo Princip were not fired at Europe, they were shots for freedom, marking the start of the Serbs’ fight for liberation from foreign occupiers.”

Music has both empowered Bosnia’s competing nationalisms over the last century and offered a balm to those afflicted. But Sarajevo, which bears the scars of four years of Bosnian Serb artillery bombardment in the sectarian war of the 1990s, losing 11,500 of its citizens, could serve as an exhibit for the healing that music can accomplish.

In May 1992 a cellist for the Sarajevo String Quartet, Vedran Smailovic, sat on a steel chair beside the site of one of the worst atrocities inflicted on the city — the mortaring by Serbian extremists of a lineup outside a bakery distribution point that killed 26 people — and played Albinoni’s Adagio, every day for 26 days, under artillery fire and in his orchestral white tie and evening dress.

He repeated his performance later in the ashes of City Hall, which became Bosnia’s National Library during the era of Tito’s Yugoslavia in 1949, and was destroyed in a firebombing by Serbian nationalist forces from the surrounding hills in August 1992. That attack resulted in the loss of two million books and manuscripts dating to the 400 years when the city was under Ottoman rule.

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In June 1994, with the Serb guns still firing, Zubin Mehta, accompanied by the tenor José Carreras and other international artists, staged a widely televised performance of Mozart’s Requiem in the rubble of the building, raising $5 million to aid the war’s refugees.

This May, after a $14 million renovation financed mostly by the European Union, the building was officially reopened with a concert of mostly local music by the Sarajevo Philharmonic, with Mr. Smailovic performing again, and a speech by Bakir Izetbegovic, the Muslim member of the country’s three-man rotating presidency, in which he declared the occasion as marking the “triumph of civilization over barbarism, of light over darkness, of life over death, and the triumph of the idea of unity and coexistence.”

For the Vienna Philharmonic, matters were never going to be that simple. Officials of the European Union, which paid most of the concert’s costs, told reporters that they chose the Vienna orchestra, which performed without any fees, because of its ties to Bosnia’s history. The country was a colonial outpost of the Austro-Hungarian empire between 1878 and the empire’s breakup at the Versailles peace conference in 1918, and had become by the time of Franz Ferdinand’s visit a showcase for Austrian rule, with garrisons that hosted crack regiments of Austrian troops, grand buildings like City Hall and Europe’s first functioning tram cars.

By the same token, the European officials said, considerable care was taken with the orchestra’s program to make sure that none of the rival sectarian groups could spot bias — in particular, any implied condemnation of the Bosnian Serbs, who were blamed for the assassination, and whose ancestral homeland, Serbia, suffered huge casualties under Austrian and Germans guns in World War I and World War II.

That necessitated avoiding a program weighted too heavily in favor of the great Germanic composers, and led to the decision that Beethoven would have what amounted to a walk-on role, in the “Ode to Joy.” The works chosen included the second movement of Haydn’s Emperor Quartet; the two movements of Schubert’s “Unfinished” Symphony; the third of Berg’s Three Pieces for Orchestra (Op. 6); Brahms’s Song of Destiny; Ravel’s “La Valse” and as an encore Josef Strauss’s “Friedenspalmen” (“Palms of Peace”) each accompanied by program notes describing them as works that resonated from different eras of conflict in Europe, and spoke for the composers’ visions of nationalism, of war and of peace.

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Echoes of War, 100 Years On

Echoes of War, 100 Years On

CreditTomas Munita for The New York Times

As the orchestra played, broadcasters for Eurovision, relaying the concert to more than 40 countries around the world, blended images of the orchestra with stuttering black-and-white film clips of battlefront action in World War I — forbidding scenes that showed Austrian and German soldiers, some in spiked helmets and masks to counter mustard gas attacks, as well as their British and French counterparts, massing for attacks, firing artillery shells and rushing forward under fire across no-man’s land, with biplane bombers overhead swooping low over the battles. The images were shown on television sets arrayed around the atrium to match the darker passages of the music, adding to the sense among those watching and listening that they were being plunged back into the nightmares of the Great War.

Clemens Hellsberg — the violinist who has been president of the Vienna Philharmonic, a self-governing orchestra, since 1997, and who is soon to retire from that position — told a news conference in Sarajevo that he, other figures in the orchestra and Franz Welser-Möst, the 53-year-old Austrian conductor who is music director of the Cleveland Orchestra and the Vienna State Opera, had spent months considering the program, settling on pieces they thought would best illustrate the themes set by the European Union — the suffering of war, and the hope for peace.

“This is a very symbolic day in a very symbolic location,” Mr. Hellsberg said. “We wanted it to be not a view back into history, but a view into the future, after the catastrophe of war.” Mr. Welser-Möst spoke in a similar vein. In choosing the “Ode to Joy,” he said, “We wished to express the hope that war should never happen on the soil of Europe again.”

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Both men were at pains to acknowledge that the Vienna Philharmonic had some accounting of its own to go through in coming to Sarajevo for a peace concert, and not only because the Austro-Hungarian empire played such a prominent role in the march to war in 1914, and in the mass killing that followed.

Under Mr. Hellsberg’s lead, the orchestra has worked in recent years to acknowledge its complicity before and during World War II with the Nazi Party and some of its most notorious leaders; the Nazi Party membership of dozens of its players; and the effort to purge Jews from its ranks after Hitler completed the Anschluss with Austria in 1938.

Speaking in a hotel only 100 yards from the assassination site, and from the embankment road that took the name of Adolf Hitler Strasse during the German military occupation of Sarajevo in World War II, Mr. Welser-Möst said that the orchestra saw itself as performing, with its visit here, the role of reconciliation and expiation that Daniel Barenboim has sought with his West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, whose mixture of Israeli and Arab players work to surmount the hatreds and divisions of the past.

“Wherever you are born, you should not deny a historical burden,” Mr. Welser-Möst said. “It is significant that the Vienna Philharmonic comes here and sends a very clear message: Never again.”

Correction: July 1, 2014

An article on Monday about a concert by the Vienna Philharmonic to mark the centennial of the assassinations of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie, in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, misstated the number of countries in the European Union. There are 28, not 27.

A version of this article appears in print on June 30, 2014, on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Remembering World War I in the Conflict’s Flash Point. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe